Featured Image Credit: PETRAS MALUKAS/AFP/Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu/Carl Court/Getty Images
Topics: Crime, Facebook, Google, Money, World News
Poppy Bilderbeck
Topics: Crime, Facebook, Google, Money, World News
A man scammed Facebook and Google into sending him over $100 million by sending them emails asking them for money.
Well, it's not quite that simple, but it certainly was a bold - yet effective - method in conning the two tech companies out of a staggering total of $122 million - until he got caught that is.
Evaldas Rimasauskas, from Lithuania, and various others who have remained unnamed, posed as a computer and electronic hardware manufacturing company based in Taiwan called Quanta Computer.
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Between 2013 and 2015, Rimasauskas sent invoice requests from Quanta Computer to Facebook and Google - with the invoices to Google totalling a hefty $23 million and those to Facebook coming to a whopping total of $99m.
With both companies having done business with Qanta Computer before, they coughed up the money in the belief they were paying for legitimate services, but, in fact, wiring money over to bank accounts in Latvia and Cyprus that were controlled by Rimasauskas, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York reports.
To explain the massive influx of money to the banks, Rimasauskas used forged invoices, contracts and letters that appeared to have been signed by executives and agents from Google and Facebook.
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As outlined by IGN, the most shocking part of this plan is that no one from either company looked into the legitimacy of the invoices - they just paid the money.
It must have seemed too good to be true for the scammer - and that's because it was. In 2017, aged 50, Rimasauskas was caught by Lithuanian authorities before being extradited to New York.
He pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and in 2019 he was sentenced to 60 months in prison for his criminal scheme.
During the sentencing, US District Judge George Daniels also ordered Rimasauskas to serve two years of supervised release, to forfeit $49.7 million and to pay a reimbursement of nearly $26.5 million.
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In short, his house of cards came crashing down - but the fact that he got away with it for so long served as a stark warning to tech companies about cyber security.
As said by acting US Attorney Joon Kim at the time of Rimasauskas' arrest: "This case should serve as a wake-up call to all companies - even the most sophisticated - that they too can be victims of phishing attacks by cyber criminals.
"And this arrest should serve as a warning to all cyber criminals that we will work to track them down, wherever they are, to hold them accountable.
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"The charges and arrest in this case were made possible thanks to the terrific work of the FBI and the cooperation of the victim companies and their financial institutions.
"We thank the companies and their banks for acting quickly, coming forward promptly, and cooperating with law enforcement; it led not only to the charges announced today, but also the recovery of much of the stolen funds."